Tel Aviv’s popularity is growing in the European media, finally! In the context of the Belgian Culinary Week in Tel Aviv, we had the pleasure of having chef Viki Geunes here, accompanied by a tv-crew for ATV – Antwerp Television and a reporter from the renowned cooking magazine ‘Culinaire Ambiance‘. In the videos below you’ll see their discoveries in the city…

Part one: Chef Viki Geunes from the renowned ‘t Zilte restaurant in Antwerp discovers the city of Tel Aviv and meets Yossi Shitrit, chef from Kitchen Market, as part of the “Belgian Culinary Week” held at the new Namal Tel Aviv. Viki visits the Carmel Market and enjoys local flavors…

Part two: Viki Geunes and Yossi Shitrit share their local knowledge and host a cooking demo for the Israeli chefs and press. Then Viki meets with Marilyn Ambach and while telling her story, she takes him to her favorite spots around Rothschild Boulevard.

Part three: Viki and Marilyn wander around Jaffa and its charm…

You can watch the ATV reruns here and wait for the May edition of Culinary Ambiance…

The Bauhaus was a school which operated in Germany between 1919 and 1933 and was devoted to art, architecture and design. It had remarkable influences on all these disciplines. Although throughout it’s years it carried varied approaches, some ideas were maintained. One main principle is the reunion of the arts and the crafts in order to achieve total works of art. According to this principle, all arts, as well as new technologies, should be combined in the art of building.

A significant approach in the school was the search for the basic ingredients of art and design. Thus evolved the “Bauhaus Style” in architecture and design—in which primary forms and colors are given great importance.

The Bauhaus had a great impact on the Modern Movement in architecture, embracing functionalism and rationality and condemning ornament. The architectural style of the modern movement is called “The International Style” or “Bauhaus Style”. This style is characterized by asymmetry, compositions of primary volumes—cubic and rounded, ribbon windows, pilots, thermometer windows, balconies, roof terraces and plays of shadow and light.

Four Israeli architects studied in the Bauhaus school: Arieh Sharon, Shmuel Mestechkin, Munio Gitai-Weinraub and Shlomo Bernstein. However, the influence of the Bauhaus on the architecture built in Israel in the 20’s, 30’s and 40’s was by far wider than being expressed by those architects only. The legacy of the Bauhaus was absorbed by other architects, studying in Brussels, Ghent and Italy, such as: Dov Carmi, Genia Averbuch, Ben-Ami Shulman, Ze’ev Rechter and Joseph Neufeld. And of course—all of those prominent figures presented the new ideas to just everyone who was around.

In Tel Aviv only, more than 4,000 “Bauhaus Style” buildings were built. Thousands more were built in Haifa, Jerusalem, the Kibbutzim and elsewhere in Israel. The main question is, therfore—how, in an era when this new style was still unpopular, did it reach such magnitude in the built work in Israel? The main answer is that the social-cultural ideology behind the “Bauhaus Style” fit like a glove to the socialist-Zionist movement and to the striving of this movement to create a new world. White houses, in every sense—form, style, material, functionality, color—grew from the sands without a past, towards a future.